Math is known to be one of the most feared school subjects for many students. According to ZEZEDU CEO and Founder Jujin Lee, in South Korea, the high rate of math dropouts and the expanding private education market are major social issues.

This is the problem that the startup aims to tackle with its product CherryPot.

“We use AI to recognise and diagnose how students are solving problems. Then, we provide accurate feedback based on students’ responses, making the highest level of personalised learning experience affordable with AI technology,” he explains in an email to e27.

According to Lee, the traditional approach to personalised learning in edutech is to predict performance based on a student’s history of correct answers per question. However, this doesn’t work in secondary school math because it takes a long time to solve a single problem, and each problem itself is complex.

“When you think about the way we receive 1:1 tutoring, it is quite obvious to utilise the solving process. However, until now, there has been no publicly available dataset or model to create a math-specific AI technology to recognise and diagnose the process, so existing services have only been able to use the correct or incorrect answer. We built our own data and models from the ground up to focus on the solution process,” he explains.

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“In our app, a student solves three to five problems per day from the chapter of their choice. That’s a very small number, but it’s enough to provide personalised, process-based learning. Even for students who don’t like to do math, five problems are not overwhelming. A simple scenario for our service would be to give feedback on how they did on these problems and provide them with personalised problems the next day. We also provide a dashboard and assignments feature for school teachers.”

ZEZEDU primarily targets secondary school students, with most of them using the service through public schools, with the budget from the government.

Teaching math to the world

According to ZEZEDU, its CherryPot platform has been used in more than 160 schools in South Korea with various scenarios, from in-class activities to after-school programmes. The company went from having three schools using their service in the first year of its launch to signing an MOU with schools affiliated with Seoul National University to expanding its work with the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education and Ministry of Education.

“Our biggest strength is our AI; since there were no publicly accessible resources for constructing process-oriented AI models, we have been started by creating our proprietary dataset for model development. It hasn’t been long since AI automation of the whole learning process became possible with our technology,” Lee says.

“We integrated our AI into our service as ‘Cherrypot 2.0’, and we started sales to schools. We remain committed to advancing our AI model even further, elevating our AI capabilities.”

Prior to founding ZEZEDU, Lee was the youngest full-time member at Kakao Brain as an AI research Engineer, being awarded a Minister Award and SW Maestro Certificate. He was also awarded a SW Maestro Mentor.

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“I am … fortunate enough to have with me Minji Cha, an award-winner in multiple autonomous driving competitions as our R&D Director, Jaehyung Baek, who was awarded by the Ministry of Science and ICT in an AI competition as our AI (Natural Language Processing) research engineer, and Sunah Kim, our learning material design and platform operation,” he says.

For 2024, the big plan for ZEZEDU is to make a profit in the global market, including Southeast Asia (SEA), through its participation in the EduSpaze accelerator programme.

“We’re proud to say that we’re the only Korean company to be selected as one of the ASU+GSV Elite 200 companies that select promising edutech companies every year. We are also enthusiastic about our participation in the EduSpaze programme,” he closes.

“Our objective is to identify suitable markets and build effective strategies for the successful introduction of CherryPot in the SEA market. We are looking forward to accelerating our market entry by having a chance to collaborate with EduSpaze.”

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